Kim Dotcom wins right to FBI files

It's shocking to think about the US Government's casual disregard for all the people that used megaupload legitimately, and indeed the FBI's disregard for the provision of documents that would be expected to be pretty much standard in most court cases. After all, the ability to see the evidence being put against you is a basic tenet of the justice system.

He could try the 'photocopying defense'.<p>In certain countries the prosecution has a legally responsibility to provide copies of the evidence to the defendant's legal team within a given time frame and bring the case to court within a second time frame. Individual copies of the evidence for the various interested parties must be provided by the prosecution to the defense team (defendant, legal counsel, barrister, etc).<p>In cases such as these with overwhelming amounts of 'evidence', a surprisingly effective defensive legal tactic, is for the defendant to request as many copies of all of the evidence as viably and legally possible.<p>It is then almost impossible for the prosecution to both copy the vast amount of evidence (imagine pages and pages of server logs) in triplicate, and bring the case to court within the allotted time. The copying alone is unfeasible.<p>If anything this tactic can be used to force a plea bargain (lesser charge etc).<p>A lawyer would have to confirm whether this would work in NZ.

Finally we may learn how it's possible what tiny fraction of those tens of petabytes of data (25? I forget) held hostage actually consists of content that the RIAA/MPAA holds rights to (back of the envelope calcs in another thread showed that there's simply not enough Hollywood movies been made to get to 5% of that amount, even if they were all encoded as 10GB BluRay rips--which the majority of movies produced is not available as).<p>It's the Porn Industry that should be suing for infringement, if anyone.<p>Even then, given the sheer amount of data stored on MegaUpload, IMO there's actually a fair possibility (though not a given) that at least a significant part of that data does not infringe anything. Copyright-infringing data is a finite resource, There's a huge amount of it, sure, but on the scale of petabytes it's finite and very non-trivial to get such amounts of it. Non-infringing but useful data, however, is still pretty much infinite at that level. There's logs, generated stuff, calculations, measurements, renderings, database backups.<p>It's guesswork, but I don't think it's improbable either. I'd really love to see a rundown of it, one day. And if it really turns out that a significant part of MegaUpload's data is indeed infringing content owned by the MPAA/RIAA, I'd be really curious to find out what part of my estimates were so wrong.

If I am ever arrested for anything, I hope to make it in to the British, Australian, NZ, or Canadian legal systems.

I find it interesting that people have files hosted in Megaupload that they have no backups for. Really?

Is it just the judge that is so awesome, or the New Zeland justice system in general?

Very few people dispute he was profiting from copyrighted material.<p>Very few people would make a better villain.<p>The best way to help the RIAA is to have a Kim Dotcom as your poster boy.